


Deeper than the Surface

by quicksilverdeancas (quicksilvermalec)



Series: Sam Winchester Bingo [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Adorable Sam Winchester, Alternate Universe - Balthazar Lives, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Alternate Universe - Gabriel Lives, Castiel is a good brother, De-Aged Sam Winchester, Destiel are lowkey pining in the background, Destiel... maybe?, Fluff, Fucking Witches, Gabriel Is A Huge Softie, Gabriel Loves Sam Winchester, Gabriel and Sam Winchester in Love, I WROTE SOME FLUFF, Jealous Gabriel, Other, POV Gabriel, POV Third Person, Protective Dean Winchester, Protective Gabriel, Slight Gabriel-centric Angst, Young Sam Winchester, and Sammy loves him back ;), and he seriously is getting pointers from Dean on how to human, be proud of me, but they're totes in love, enjoy!!!!!, like almost entirely fluff, mostly cause he's jealous as hell of Dean, oops sorry, so i'm not gonna tag it, they are not explicit at the end of this fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-27
Updated: 2019-09-27
Packaged: 2020-10-29 13:17:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20797247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quicksilvermalec/pseuds/quicksilverdeancas
Summary: “Look!” he shouted. “I have a golden teddy bear and his name is Gabriel!”Gabriel’s brow furrowed. “That’s my name,” he replied gently. Sam nodded wisely.“I know,” the kid said matter-of-factly. “Sometimes when I’m sad you make me not sad anymore. So when you’re gone and I’m sad, I hug my teddy bear and I feel better.”or, in which Sam Winchester was not supposed to be able to elicit these reactions in Gabriel. This was colossally unfair and something needed to be done.





	Deeper than the Surface

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the Sam Winchester Bingo. It covers the square "De-Aged".
> 
> (I chose that square because I had already started this fic and needed an excuse to finish it oops.)
> 
> This one actually went almost exactly how I planned! Isn't that great.
> 
> Enjoy.

Everyone was shouting. There were at least five people in the room, but probably more, and they were all shouting different things about the same subject. Dean was probably yelling something about not knowing what to do, Cas was telling Dean to calm the fuck down, Jack was generally just being very loudly confused, Balthazar was there for some reason, ranting about how stupid hunters were, and Sam was screaming about how hungry he was.

(Not that Gabriel noticed Sam. [And usually when he said that he meant it untruthfully slash sarcastically slash ironically, because he always noticed Sam. But this time he meant it genuinely – he didn’t even realize that Sam was in the room, for reasons he will elaborate on later.] He was too busy shouting over everybody else.)

“Okay, what the actual fuck is going on here?” he bellowed, and everyone stopped talking to look at him. It was good to know that he was actually pretty intimidating even though he was only five-foot-some. He looked around the room, then added, “and where the hell is the moose?”

Dean sighed. “Good news and bad news, buddy. Which do you want first?”

“The good, obviously,” Gabriel replied.

“Both of those questions have the same answer.”

Gabriel was suddenly afraid of what was to come. “What’s the bad news, then?”

Dean took a deep breath and averted his eyes. “This is it.” He pointed at the counter. Sitting on it was an eight-year-old brunet boy with multicolored eyes, who had, until about five seconds ago, been crying about being starving. “Sam’s right there.”

Gabriel recoiled.

“_Excuse me_?” he demanded, convinced he’d heard incorrectly.

“That’s Sam,” Dean confirmed. “More accurately, that’s Sam circa 1990.”

Gabriel took a deep breath. “Okay, so would someone who is not a Winchester please explain to me what happened to the Winchesters, considering that they are both cognitively incapable of doing it themselves?”

Castiel stepped up, but his explanation was somewhat… lacking. “Witch hunt.”

Gabriel looked at him for a moment. “You sound like your boyfriend. Next?”

Jack looked up. “Hi. They were hunting a witch and he de-aged Sam back to being about eight years old.”

“Thank you, finally someone who speaks English. So how are we going to fix it then?”

Nobody spoke or looked at him. After a very long and extremely uncomfortable silence, Gabe clapped his hands together somewhat bitterly. “Okay then,” he announced. “So since you’re all morons and nobody has a plan, I’m going to take care of tiny Samsquatch while Cas, Dean, and Jack do research. And Balthazar, if you’d like to help as well it would be greatly appreciated, but if you’d rather bother us you can fuck back off to wherever you’ve been hiding.”

Between one breath and the next, Balthazar was gone.

“Hey, Sam,” Gabriel called. Sam looked up at him interestedly. “Do you know who I am?”

Sam cocked his head to one side, similarly to the way that Cas did when he was confused by humans. It made Gabriel’s heart hurt just a little. “Your name is Gabriel. You’re a nice angel. I like you.”

Gabriel clapped again. “Great. Come with me, kiddo. We’re gonna go play and let the adults do their adult thing.”

Sam jumped down off the counter and obediently followed Gabriel into the next room. Gabriel slumped in a chair and patted his leg, and the kid climbed into his lap.

If Sam were normal, Gabriel would be appreciating this greatly right now. As it was, even the idea made him shudder in disgust at himself, so he tucked that thought away for another time once he got Samzilla back to his regular size.

“So what’s up, kiddo? What do you want to do?”

Sam looked up at him with his big sad eight-year-old puppy eyes. “Where’s Dean?” He jumped down. “I want my big brother.”

He ran into the hallway and started shouting “Dean!” in his little energetic childlike voice. Gabriel felt his heart sink into the floor.

Even as a child – probably _especially _as a child, let’s be real – Sam would always prefer his brother to Gabriel. Or to anyone, really. There was nobody Sam cared about more.

The archangel really wished that didn’t hurt as much as it did.

He sighed resignedly and stood up to walk slowly through the halls of the bunker to find the little menace. He finally located him in an empty corner of the library, gazing in awe at all the stacks upon stacks of books available to him in there. Well, at least he was acting like himself.

Gabriel bodily lifted him off the ground and carried him away. He pounded his fists on the blond’s shoulder, causing him to wince slightly, and outright _bawled _his brother’s name. Gabriel shifted so he was sitting on his shoulders, which got Sam to stop crying somewhat.

“Okay, kid, look. Dean’s busy, okay? And so is Cas, and so is Jack. You’re stuck with me. And I’m really fuckin’ sorry for you, cause I wouldn’t wanna be stuck with me either, but this is what you’ve got, so why don’t you and I come up with something fun to do while Deano is dealing with his stupid hunter grown-up shit.”

Gabriel swore he didn’t cuss this much around normal kids. It was just that, well… this was _Sam_. And Sam was vulgar and violent and big and very much _not _innocent or sweet or childlike. The idea that this could have been what Sam used to be like fairly broke Gabriel’s heart into about a million pieces.

What had this child done to deserve to lose his mother? What had he done to deserve being raised like a goddamn Spartan? What had he done that earned him Hell – literally and figuratively – over and over and over until he couldn’t take it anymore? Why was this his lot in life? It made Gabriel irrationally angry.

The next time he saw God, he was going to have some serious questions for him.

(It occurred to Gabriel that he was becoming much like Castiel: overly protective of both and desperately in love with one of the Winchesters. And boy, was he glad they’d picked different ones. It’d be awkward to have to fight his brother over some human.)

Sam smiled at him then, and it was a surprising smile. It wasn’t a half-smile like the ones Gabriel usually saw on him – it wasn’t barely formed, tentative and hesitant, just _waiting _to be wiped off his face. It lit up his eyes and made him look like the embodiment of joy, and suddenly Gabe was reminded of exactly why he loved children. It was this. Sam gave himself over to the smile fully, and at that moment in time, that smile was all that existed in him.

He wanted to see that smile on adult-Sam’s face.

“Okay,” he said. “You’re not bad to hang out with… for an old guy.”

Gabriel scoffed, pretending to be offended, and gave the kid a noogie. (Don’t ask him why, he had absolutely no idea. It just seemed appropriate.) “I’m not _that _old. I’m just, let’s see… carry the 9… as old as time.”

Sam giggled. “Old guy.”

He squirmed his way out of Gabe’s grip and sprinted away from him on his tiny legs, which led to a long game of tag that was some of the most fun Gabriel had had in a very long time.

When they were done, they collapsed on the couch together, a big messy pile of flying limbs and breathless laughter. And Gabriel just hugged the kid, and they fell asleep like that.

#~+~#

“Ahem.” Gabriel jolted awake to the sound of someone clearing their throat. He expected Dean to be disapproving, seeing Gabe cuddling the tiny version of his younger brother, but instead he just looked endlessly amused. Castiel was standing next to him, looking awkward as ever but equally entertained. Gabriel gently shook the little kid awake, and he rubbed his eyes before looking at the two men standing over them. His eyes widened quite a bit and he smiled that huge adorable golden smile again before jumping up and grabbing his brother’s leg.

“Dean!” he shouted. Then he frowned, still hugging the taller man. “This doesn’t feel right,” he muttered. Dean laughed.

“Yeah, usually you’re the bigger one, buddy,” he told the young boy. Sam looked up at him, then seemed to accept this explanation as fact and nodded.

“Okay!” He finally let go of his vicelike grip on Dean’s leg and looked at Cas. “Dean, why does the angel wear such a funny coat?”

Dean laughed. “I really don’t know. I think he just likes it, dude. Are you hungry?”

Sam nodded. “I want a breakfast burrito.”

Dean picked him up. “Well you know who makes a killer breakfast burrito? This guy.” He pointed his free thumb at himself. Sam stuck his tongue out just a little between his teeth.

“Yeah, I know. That’s why I asked. _Duh_.”

Dean walked away, still carrying a Sam who was, in all honesty, too big to be carried. Gabriel watched them walk away with a growing feeling of irrational and unproductive jealousy. Cas looked at him with a very obvious mix of fondness and faint exasperation written on his face.

“You are not as subtle as you think you are, my brother.” Gabe glared at him and he smiled gently. “I’m sorry, but you need a push.”

Gabriel huffed. “Yeah, I know.” Then he forced his signature smirk back onto his face and added, “not that you don’t, but…”

“Dean is _not_ my boyfriend, Gabriel, and he never will be.”

Gabriel scoffed in the back of his throat. “Sure. Keep telling yourself that. You’ve done everything short of fall into bed together.”

Cas rolled his eyes and walked away. Gabriel fell back onto the couch and didn’t move for several hours.

#~+~#

The three of them settled into a comfortable schedule of shifts for watching over Sam and making sure he wasn’t destroying anything or lighting the bunker on fire. Gabriel did his best not to resent the fact that Sam enjoyed his time with Dean more than with anyone else.

He didn’t succeed very well, but he really did try.

It made sense, after all. Dean was the one that Sam really knew. Back when Sam was eight, he had no idea who Gabriel or Castiel were, and even though he had retained apparently some of his memories of the two of them, at least enough to know their names and that they were trustworthy, Dean was still the person that he was most connected to at this point in his life.

Gabriel would do well to remember that.

He was jerked out of his thoughts at that particular moment by the kid running up to him and grabbing his hand. “Hey. Hey come with me.”

Gabriel laughed obediently stood and allowed himself to be dragged into Sam’s bedroom. It looked much the same as it had before this entire clusterfuck, but for Sam decorating and brightening it up every so slightly over the past few days.

He let go of the archangel’s hand once he was over the threshold and bent down to grab something. He turned around, grinning his little sunshine grin, and goddammit, Sam Winchester, you were not supposed to be able to do this to Gabriel’s heart.

“Look!” he shouted. “I have a golden teddy bear and his name is Gabriel!”

Gabriel’s brow furrowed. “That’s my name,” he replied gently. Sam nodded wisely.

“I know,” the kid said matter-of-factly. “Sometimes when I’m sad you make me not sad anymore. So when you’re gone and I’m sad, I hug my teddy bear and I feel better.”

_Don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry **Gabriel you are not allowed to fucking cry in front of this stupid adorable child.**_

“That’s sweet,” he choked out. Sam looked at him concernedly.

“Are you okay?”

Gabriel nodded. “Yeah, I’m fine. I’m- shit, kid, you’re just too frickin cute.”

Sam’s smile burst across his face again and he practically threw himself at the archangel who had no choice but to catch him. “You’re the best,” he proclaimed. Gabriel just sort of hugged him back and tried to get over the extreme shock that accompanied everything this kid did.

#~+~#

Almost three weeks and they’d finally gotten Sam back to normal. For some reason, though, Gabriel was not informed.

Dean and Cas went on a hunt and took the kid with them – which Gabriel heatedly protested – and when they came back there was a sincere lack of energetic eight-year-old and a very present six-five moose.

As soon as he was through the doorway, Gabriel sighed in relief and jumped at him. “Oh, thank fucking Dad you’re back, Moosekavitch.”

Sam looked down at him a little confusedly. “Yeah… I’m excited too. Jeez, what’d I _do _to you?”

“Oh, nothing,” Gabe replied softly. “Nothing except fucking torture me with your stupid smile and your stupid pretty eyes.”

It was just then that he realized that Dean and Cas were staring at them – Cas with a knowing smirk and Dean with a look of utter confusion. A Winchester trademark. He released his friend and clapped his hands together. “Whelp,” he announced. “I have laid claim to this one. He’s mine now.”

“Does he get any say in this?” Sam asked, laughing a little.

“Nope!” Gabriel proclaimed cheerfully. “Now come on, Sammich, you are long past overdue for a patented Archangel Ravishing.”

Dean made a disgusted sound and took Cas by the elbow, leading him away from their brothers and deeper into the bunker. Gabriel laughed, and Sam smiled at him.

“Took ya long enough.”


End file.
